Guess Again

by Charlie Donlea

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Thrillers

Synopsis

On the 10th anniversary of a teenage girl’s disappearance, her cold case breaks open in dangerous ways…and threatens to tear apart her small Wisconsin town all over again in the masterfully twisty new psychological suspense novel from the internationally bestselling author of Twenty Years Later.

For fans of Riley Sager, Anna Downes, Alex Finlay, Stacy Willingham, and Karin Slaughter.

Ten years ago, 17-year-old high school volleyball star Callie Jones vanished from her quiet Wisconsin lake community. A highly publicized search followed but her body was never found. The case went cold, but the echoes still linger.

Ethan Hall, a former renegade detective turned ER doctor, left law enforcement to escape the horrors of the kid crime division. But on the tenth anniversary of Callie’s disappearance, his former partner, Pete Kramer, makes a desperate request. Pete is the veteran detective who originally investigated the case. Now he’s dying, and to ease his conscience and get closure for the Jones family, he needs Ethan to return to the haunting work he left behind—and solve what happened to Callie, once and for all.

Word soon spreads and everyone in the small town of Cherryview feels a rush of hope that answers will finally be found. Amid a sweltering heatwave, Ethan’s investigation gains momentum, but reexamining old evidence won’t be enough. He needs a new way into the case, no matter how dangerous or unconventional. And it comes from the least likely of sources—an inmate in a maximum-security prison. 

Soon Ethan’s methods draw him deeper into a twisted psychological game. Because there is much more to the nightmare of Callie’s disappearance than he imagined, including a connection with his own dark past . . . and secrets that are still worth killing for.

Release date: July 29, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

ETHAN HALL HAD BEEN THE OLDEST STUDENT IN HIS MEDICAL school class. He was thirty-six when he walked into gross anatomy lab during his first year of med school. Today, he was a forty-five-year-old emergency medicine physician. Although he was without the years of experience other physicians in their forties sported, Ethan was more than competent. He had finished first in his class and could have gone into any specialty. He chose emergency medicine because his previous occupation had conditioned him to chaos, and somewhere along the way bedlam became imprinted in his DNA.

Years earlier he was a special agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation and in charge of investigating crimes against kids. For a while it was satisfying to put away the subhumans who committed such atrocities. But the job had taken a toll. He saw too much violence directed at society’s most vulnerable. A “win” in his old profession still left a kid dead, a family grieving, and a perp getting three meals a day and a warm pillow at night. During the ten years that he worked for the DCI, he’d lost faith in the human race. He fell so far adrift that he had started to lose touch with the human condition. It had been a decade-long slippery slope and dangerous spiral he needed to escape before the void swallowed him whole. He decided a career change was necessary to keep his sanity. So, he put in his notice and applied to medical school.

Now, as an emergency room physician, he was able to help his patients before they died. It was a refreshing change, and something his life desperately needed. For the first time in many years, Ethan Hall was a happy man.

He pulled the curtain to the side of ER Room 3 and found his patient sitting in the bedside chair. This was unusual. Patients were typically lying in bed when he entered the room. Also odd was that this patient was not wearing a hospital gown. The thirty-eight-year-old male, according to the chart, sat in the chair wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Taken together with the man’s long blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders, he could have been on the cover of a surfing magazine. Ethan smiled.

“I’m Dr. Hall.”

“Hey, Doc. Christian Malone.”

“Are you the patient?”

“I am. I just can’t do the whole gown and the bed thing. I mean, unless something was tragically wrong with me. Then it’s fine. But otherwise, it just takes away my dignity and makes me feel like shit.”

“Fair enough,” Ethan said, tapping on the computer keyboard to bring up the man’s file. “You’re having abdominal pain?”

“I was. Not anymore. Listen, I don’t want to waste your time. I had a nasty pain in my back, so I came in this morning. Your nurse told me it was a kidney stone. She said the doctor ordered pain meds, shot me up with morphine, and hustled me down to have a CT scan. But just before she gave me the morphine, the pain went away. Like from a ten to a zero in a matter of seconds. She insisted on giving me the morphine anyway because she said the pain had subsided only because I had found a comfortable position. But the pain never came back.”

Ethan pulled up the CT scan on the computer and saw that his patient had a kidney stone sitting in his bladder, indicating that it had already made the painful trek through the ureter.

“Yeah, see? It passed into my bladder,” the man said.

“You a doctor?” Ethan asked.

“No, just a tech guy from California.”

“California? What are you doing in Madison?”

“I escaped Silicon Valley and live here now.”

“Welcome to the Midwest. I’m assuming this isn’t your first kidney stone.”

“Nope. I’ve had two others. Hurts like hell until it gets to the bladder, then I pee it out a couple of days later. I tried to tell the nurse, but she shot me up with morphine anyhow. Gotta admit, the buzz is pretty phenomenal.”

Ethan smiled. Christian Malone, the thirty-eight-year-old Silicon Valley transplant, suddenly sounded like a Californian.

“Did you drive yourself to the ER this morning?”

“Yes sir.”

Ethan tapped on the keyboard as he entered notes into the chart. “I can’t let you drive after we gave you morphine. We’ll have to keep you for a few hours before I can discharge you.”

“I’ll call an Uber.”

“I’d have to watch you climb in the car. Otherwise the hospital would be liable for discharging you while you’re under the influence of a narcotic.”

“Come on, Doc. I feel fine.”

“Morphine is like that. One moment you’re good, the next you’re high as a kite.”

“Can you make an exception? I’ve been here for three hours already.”

Ethan checked his watch.

“You’re the last patient of my shift. How about I buy you a cup of coffee? If you’re still feeling woozy, I’ll drive you home myself.”

“Sure thing, Doc. As long as I can get the hell out of this room.”

THEY SKIPPED THE CAFETERIA COFFEE AND OPTED FOR A STARBUCKS drive-thru, both ordering venti black coffees. Back on the road, Ethan commented on Christian’s coffee choice.

“No skinny vanilla with soy for the California transplant?”

Christian smiled. “Black coffee all day for me.”

“All day?”

“It’s all I drink.”

“If you want to avoid another kidney stone, I’d suggest adding some water to your diet.”

“I’ll take it under consideration.” Christian pointed. “Take a right up there.”

Ethan twisted his Jeep Wrangler onto a winding road that snaked through a tree-lined area along the water until he emerged a mile later at the edge of Lake Okoboji.

“There I am,” Christian said, pointing.

Ethan looked across the lake to where a massive home sat at the water’s edge. The morning sunlight reflected off the large windows that made up the back of the house. A set of stairs spiraled down from each side of the back patio and cut through the emerald-green grass to meet the man-made beach area that sprinkled down to the water’s edge.

Ethan had seen the house before. Everyone had. It was the largest on the lake.

“That’s your house?”

“Yes sir.” Christian pointed through the passenger-side window. “Head around to the north, it’s easier to get in through the back entrance.”

Ethan hesitated a moment before turning the wheel and heading around the lake. Ten minutes later he pulled through the gate at the rear entrance of Christian’s home and parked in the driveway, counting five bay doors on the garage.

“You feel okay?” Ethan asked.

“Unfortunately. My buzz is just about gone. Come inside and finish your coffee. I’ll show you the house.”

Ethan followed Christian through the massive double-doors at the front and shook his head at the enormity of the home. The interior was a combination of cutting-edge innovation and Northwoods Wisconsin.

“We’ll sit out back,” Christian said.

Ethan walked through the home, noticing the tablets on the walls throughout that put everything from the thermostat to music at Christian’s fingertips. Lights came on as they walked, although he never saw Christian touch a light switch. The back of the home was an uninterrupted sequence of floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a majestic view of the lake.

“This is pretty amazing.”

“You should see it when it snows. The only time I like the snow is when I’m sitting in this room and every window is filled with falling snowflakes.”

Christian pushed through a tall glass door and walked out onto the patio. Ethan followed and they sat at the patio table.

“The heat this year is nearly unbearable,” Christian said.

“It’s only predicted to get worse,” Ethan said.

“The heat is okay. It’s the humidity that’s killing me.”

“So how does a tech guy from California end up in Wisconsin?” Ethan said. “You’ve got to tell me that story.”

Christian took a sip of coffee and looked out over Lake Okoboji. A few sailboats tacked at different angles, the morning wind filling the sails. A speedboat hauled a water skier behind it.

“I founded an online file storage and sharing company. It started out primarily as files but expanded to include photos and videos and basically anything you want to store securely in the cloud, share with other users, and have access to across all your devices.”

Ethan squinted his eyes. “Like CramCase?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“CramCase is your company?”

“It was. I sold it.”

Ethan slowly nodded his head and raised his eyebrows. “I read about that last year. Didn’t it sell for . . .”

Christian nodded. “Billions.”

There was a short pause before Christian made a slight correction.

“Well, billions and billions.”

“Damn. And you owned the whole thing?”

“No, just fifty-one percent. I wrote the code for it in my college dorm room. Back then it was just my roommate and me. He’s still at the company. But I couldn’t take it anymore. Everyone thinks they want to be filthy rich, but there’s this threshold of wealth not many people know about. Once you reach it, especially through a publicly traded company, you lose freedom rather than gain more of it. I got sick of stuffy, Ivy League nerds telling me what to do with my money and my company. The whole situation beat me down and stole my passion. So I sold my portion and got the hell out of Silicon Valley.”

“And landed in . . . Cherryview, Wisconsin? How did that happen?”

“By way of Chicago, but that’s a whole other story.”

Ethan nodded. His life had taken a similar trajectory, minus the billions. He once had a job he loved, but lost his passion for it.

“You look like you’re doing fine,” Ethan said. “Both in life, and since my nurse shot you up with morphine. If you want us to analyze the stone when you pass it, we can. Tell you what it’s made of so that you can change your diet and try to avoid another one.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll just let it slip out to sea after it exits my body. But thanks.”

“Add some water into your daily routine. Trust me, it’ll help.”

“Got it. Thanks for the ride home, Doc.”

“Sure thing.”

“You headed back to the hospital?”

“No. I’m heading out of town. I’ve got a few days off for the long weekend.”

“Safe travels. And when you get back, stop over someday. I don’t know many people in town yet, and this big house scares everyone away.”

Ethan smiled. “Maybe I will.”

THE MAN LIMPED THROUGH THE HALLS OF THE HOSPITAL. THE FLACCID leg was new and had come on quickly. Despite the doctor’s warning that such symptoms were imminent, the deterioration still came as a surprise. There was no pain, just the refusal of his right leg to follow what his mind commanded it to do. So he limped and used whatever was around to help with balance—the door he pushed through to gain access to the ER. A gurney in the hallway. And, on his final approach to the nurses’ station, a patient’s vitals monitor, the pole of which he grabbed at the last minute when he was sure he was about to topple over.

“Sorry about that,” he said to the patient lying in the bed and waiting to be transported somewhere.

He made it to the nurses’ station and placed both hands on the countertop.

“Did you check in at registration?” a nurse asked.

“They told me to just come back here.”

“No. They need to collect your insurance information and put you in the queue.”

He wasn’t surprised by her confusion. He looked like any other injured Joe gimping into the ER.

“I’m not a patient.”

He reached into the breast pocket of his sport coat and produced his badge.

“Special Agent Pete Kramer with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation. I’m looking for Ethan Hall.”

The nurse hesitated a moment.

“Tall, good-looking guy. Mid-forties. Works out and stays in annoyingly good shape.”

“I know who Dr. Hall is.”

“Ah, perfect. He around?”

The nurse tapped on her computer. She took a quick moment to read the screen.

“Dr. Hall’s shift ended at seven this morning.”

“He finished work at seven in the morning?”

“Yes. He was on overnights this week. Eleven to seven.”

“So he’ll be back here at eleven o’clock tonight?”

“No. He’s gone for a few days now. On vacation for the Memorial Day holiday.”

“When will he be back?”

The nurse paused, and Pete saw the suspicion on her face.

“Don’t worry. The good doctor’s not in trouble. We’re old friends and he owes me a favor.”

Pete put the badge back into his pocket.

The nurse offered a reluctant smile. She double-checked the schedule on the computer. “Dr. Hall will be back next Wednesday. The twenty-eighth.”

“Thanks. Have a good weekend.”

Pete Kramer limped out of the ER. He’d come back next week.

ON FRIDAY MORNING, ETHAN SECURED THE BOSE HEADPHONES OVER his ears, ran through his final flight check, and fired up the engine of the Aviat Husky A-1C-200 amphibious seaplane, which was capable of taking off from the private airstrip in Madison, and landing on the lake up north where his cabin was located. The propeller began to rotate until it was only a blur to the human eye. He looked at his passenger next to him and reminded her to take a deep breath.

Maddie Jacobson was relaxed only when they were cruising at eight thousand feet. And then, just barely. During takeoff and landing she was a mess. She hated flying commercial, let alone in a two-passenger floatplane.

Ethan adjusted his mouthpiece. When he spoke, his voice echoed through Maddie’s headset.

“Piece of cake,” he said to her.

Maddie closed her eyes and nodded.

He taxied the small two-passenger plane onto the runway and waited for clearance from air traffic control. Once he had the all clear, he advanced the throttles for takeoff and started down the runway. When he achieved the proper ground speed, Ethan pulled back on the controls and lifted the Husky into the air. The ragged bounce of the runway disappeared, replaced by the smooth transition of being airborne. It was his favorite part of flying—the moment he left the earth. It had always filled him with a feeling of freedom. He reached over and squeezed his girlfriend’s hand. Maddie responded by keeping her eyes closed and ignoring him.

They flew north out of Madison, climbing to eight thousand feet. With the flight plan programmed into the Garmin GPS on the north-northwest heading and confirmation that weather was clear for the next two hours, he engaged the autopilot and switched on his music—Jimmy Buffett came through his headphones. “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” Maddie finally opened her eyes and exhaled.

“Good news, bad news,” Ethan said through the headset. “Bad news: We’ve got two hours left in this plane. Good news: When we land, we’ve got five days all to ourselves.”

Maddie attempted a smile. “I’ll appreciate the days in front of me when you get us safely back to earth.”

“Roger that.”

One of the perks of emergency medicine was Ethan’s ability to arrange his schedule in such a way that allowed him to work seven straight days of eight-hour shifts in exchange for seven days off. The down time served as a recurring battery recharge that prevented burnout, and for the past two years he had followed the schedule without interruption. He spent the days off up north, and Maddie joined him whenever her schedule allowed.

Ethan owned a cabin on Lake Morikawa in northern Wisconsin, east of Duluth, Minnesota and not far from the shores of Lake Superior. The lake itself was the property of the Bad River Reservation, and specifically the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe. Ethan’s cabin was one of only eight homes on the lake. It had been built in the 1920s by his great-great-grandfather after a land cession treaty was signed that awarded the acreage to the U.S. government. Ethan’s ancestors had been the last vestiges of Hall Copper, a mining company that rose to prominence during the copper boom in the late 1800s before going bankrupt during the Great Depression. All that remained from that once prominent empire was the Halls’ fishing cabin planted on the shores of Lake Morikawa.

A government-sponsored buyback program in the mid-1900s allowed the Chippewa Tribe to purchase the land back from homeowners for a handsome sum. Ethan’s grandfather, along with only seven other Lake Morikawa residents, turned down the generous offer and kept the cabin in the family. The result was that the lakeside cabin belonged to the Halls, but the surrounding land—including the lake itself—belonged to the Chippewa.

Many stipulations came with owning the property. The greatest of which was that repairs and improvements could be made to the cabin’s structure, but the property’s footprint could never be enlarged because the surrounding land belonged to the Native Americans. And it was only because of the Chippewa’s generosity that Ethan was able to fish the lake. Despite the restrictions, there was a benefit to the arrangement. Since the lake and the surrounding land were the property of the Chippewa Reservation, it ensured that no other homes or cabins would be built. Ethan had back-doored his way into having Lake Morikawa nearly to himself.

To show his gratitude, he’d worked out a quid pro quo with the reservation over the last few years. After graduating medical school and starting his emergency medicine residency, Ethan had offered free healthcare to the Chippewa Tribe. Three times each year, Ethan set up shop and spent a week at the reservation performing general medical exams, prescribing medications for diabetes and hypertension, diagnosing disease and dental issues, and setting up referrals when necessary. In exchange, Ethan had fallen into the good graces of the Chippewa, and no one ever bothered him when he was at his cabin. The tribe knew him as the nice doctor who kept to himself and took care of them three times a year.

After two and a half hours and three hundred miles, Ethan spotted Lake Morikawa in the distance and began their descent. There was a subtle chop on the water, which aided his visuals. The wind was from the north and he cut into it as he made his approach. He cleared the tops of the tall pine trees and reduced his air speed to just beyond a stall before touching down in the middle of the lake. The engine was at idle as he taxied toward the dock in front of the cabin. Standing at the end of the pier was Kai Be. . .